WoW: Legion vs. GW2: HoT
I was recently asked to make the comparison between Legion and Heart of Thorns. Straight-up, I have to say that's something of an apples vs. oranges comparison. The two base games have some fundamental differences that result in very different MMO experiences from where I sit. So... it's pretty hard to compare that.
HoT has been around significantly longer.
Mechanics: It improved the basic game with, more than any of the other masteries, gliding as a way to get around. That's not as liberating as actual flight, but introducing movement in that third dimension is a pretty big deal for the feel of a game. The news skills, class, and specializations didn't really make a big impact on me personally.
Story Content: The HoT story and Living Story add-ons are... narratively okay, I guess. I've had issues with some of the goings on. Overall, it feels "fine" without striking me as good or bad. The primary NPC characters are a highlight, with a good range of personalities. Seeing that crew (krewe?) is what really makes the Living Story updates shine for me.
Play Experience: There's some neat stuff here, but... but... I have some major problems with it. The scale of events is too large. HoT doubled down on world bosses/events with things like the defense of Tarir, giving players major events happening on a schedule that influence a whole zone. The down side, however, is they generally require groups and some level of coordination to succeed at. As a mostly-solo player, I feel totally lost in the shuffle of those events - just part of a horde of players running around. To me, that's interesting about twice, then it's mind-numbingly boring and repetitive. It also gets more difficult now that lots of players have moved on to newer maps and such. So... I'd say I have a lot of disappointment with the game in that regard.
Legion is still new, so there's a lot that could happen. More than anything, it feels to me like a "Best of WoW" expansion.
Mechanics: There's nothing as flashy as the introduction of flight, or even gliding. The mechanical upgrades in Legion strike me as incremental and mostly under-the-hood. Things like shared resource nodes and level scaled zones are great improvements over how things were before, but after a little bit, you don't even notice they're there.
Story Content: Here's where the earliness comes in. We've only got the first, albeit substantial, bite of the Legion story so far. Overall, I like the story itself, even if the core is a pretty cliche "gather the artifacts" quest. I find I really want to help the exiled elves of Suramar and the Tauren of Highmountain. The class hall stories vary, but I am still enamored by the paladins'. And while HoT revolved almost entirely around one core story, there are lots of smaller ones in Legion. I want to see what happens next.
In comparison to HoT, though, most of the characters are a weakness - major lore figures who seem to be driven by narrative "needs" rather than any solid rationale, which many of them taking up the "idiot ball" along the way.
Play Experience: WoW is straight-up, more familiar and comfortable to me, so I'm probably biased. The leveling experience feels good, reasonably-paced, and satisfying most of the time. The game at level cap is still fairly new - it has its grindy parts, but while the cycling world quests could use more variety, they have not felt as repetitive as the map events in GW2 to me yet. I may gripe about mythic-only dungeons, but overall the dungeons and raids are still more accessible to me in WoW than GW2 - I may only ever see Legion raid in LFR "easy" mode, but I'll probably never set foot in the HoT raid.
So... there's that, for what it's worth.
HoT has been around significantly longer.
Mechanics: It improved the basic game with, more than any of the other masteries, gliding as a way to get around. That's not as liberating as actual flight, but introducing movement in that third dimension is a pretty big deal for the feel of a game. The news skills, class, and specializations didn't really make a big impact on me personally.
Story Content: The HoT story and Living Story add-ons are... narratively okay, I guess. I've had issues with some of the goings on. Overall, it feels "fine" without striking me as good or bad. The primary NPC characters are a highlight, with a good range of personalities. Seeing that crew (krewe?) is what really makes the Living Story updates shine for me.
Play Experience: There's some neat stuff here, but... but... I have some major problems with it. The scale of events is too large. HoT doubled down on world bosses/events with things like the defense of Tarir, giving players major events happening on a schedule that influence a whole zone. The down side, however, is they generally require groups and some level of coordination to succeed at. As a mostly-solo player, I feel totally lost in the shuffle of those events - just part of a horde of players running around. To me, that's interesting about twice, then it's mind-numbingly boring and repetitive. It also gets more difficult now that lots of players have moved on to newer maps and such. So... I'd say I have a lot of disappointment with the game in that regard.
Legion is still new, so there's a lot that could happen. More than anything, it feels to me like a "Best of WoW" expansion.
Mechanics: There's nothing as flashy as the introduction of flight, or even gliding. The mechanical upgrades in Legion strike me as incremental and mostly under-the-hood. Things like shared resource nodes and level scaled zones are great improvements over how things were before, but after a little bit, you don't even notice they're there.
Story Content: Here's where the earliness comes in. We've only got the first, albeit substantial, bite of the Legion story so far. Overall, I like the story itself, even if the core is a pretty cliche "gather the artifacts" quest. I find I really want to help the exiled elves of Suramar and the Tauren of Highmountain. The class hall stories vary, but I am still enamored by the paladins'. And while HoT revolved almost entirely around one core story, there are lots of smaller ones in Legion. I want to see what happens next.
In comparison to HoT, though, most of the characters are a weakness - major lore figures who seem to be driven by narrative "needs" rather than any solid rationale, which many of them taking up the "idiot ball" along the way.
Play Experience: WoW is straight-up, more familiar and comfortable to me, so I'm probably biased. The leveling experience feels good, reasonably-paced, and satisfying most of the time. The game at level cap is still fairly new - it has its grindy parts, but while the cycling world quests could use more variety, they have not felt as repetitive as the map events in GW2 to me yet. I may gripe about mythic-only dungeons, but overall the dungeons and raids are still more accessible to me in WoW than GW2 - I may only ever see Legion raid in LFR "easy" mode, but I'll probably never set foot in the HoT raid.
So... there's that, for what it's worth.
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